Okay
by boxcat
Summary: They were young and in love, but they were never invincible.


"Can I read in here?"

"Okay."

She wanders in, wrapped in her quilted blanket as if it were a cloak, with her bare toes peeping out. He fingers the corner of the parchment he's reading and pretends he's not watching her, but he's read the same paragraph twice now and its meaning still hasn't registered.

She's lying on the carpeted floor, tucked into the makeshift cocoon she's crafted from her blanket as she reads a muggle novel. He's sitting at the table with a mug of tea, reading Dumbledore's latest letter.

He steals a glance at her, but she's engrossed in her book. A minute passes, then another.

He glances her way again.

She catches him, this time, and sighs. She says nothing, but raises one side of the blanket up. He leaves his glasses on the table and joins her in her quilted cocoon, and they resume reading.

* * *

><p>"That's supposed to be my side of the bed tonight," he says. It's the colder side, the one by the window, where tendril's of wind creep in and become tangled in their weary limbs.<p>

She's awake, tracing patterns on her pillow. No – _his_ pillow. It's his turn to sleep there.

"Okay," she says, her voice muffled by her hair. But she doesn't move.

He tugs his shirt off, up over his head, and tosses it aside. She doesn't ask him any of the questions that he makes a point of asking whenever she returns late at night with troubled eyes and scars freshly forming.

He hears nothing but the soft whispers of her breath escaping as he slides in next to her, and they share the cold side of the bed. It's a sound that's as familiar to him as the creak of his boyhood bedroom floor.

* * *

><p>They're standing in front of the mirror, brushing their teeth, and he's hogging most of the space in their cramped bathroom. They have resolved to spend whatever time they have together, even if it means that the sink becomes a communal space.<p>

He can't help looking at the mildew collecting on the corners of the walls, because he knows she'll scold him for it, and he hopes she won't notice – but when he looks up, he finds her engrossed in her dental care.

He snorts, and then coughs, as toothpaste burns the back of his throat. She doesn't even look up, but he feels a slight pressure on his toes, and glances downwards to see that she's stepping on them lightly.

She spits and rinses, and casually raises her leg up to brush the back of his – and he finds, to his horror, that he's especially ticklish.

She leaves the bathroom in a blur of red, and lets her husband fend for himself.

"Breakfast?" she calls to him, as she enters the kitchen.

"Okay," he responds eagerly from the bathroom, and she can't help smiling.

* * *

><p>She can barely make out his face in the starlight, hovering a few inches above her as they both gasp and shudder.<p>

He rests his weight on her, his face finding the contours of her neck.

"We didn't – we didn't use…" he murmurs against her skin.

"Don't worry," she says softly, ruffling the back of his hair. "Don't worry – it's too late for that now. I'm already…" she bites off, the words fading into the silence.

It took him a moment to understand. She felt, rather than heard

"Oh…okay," he chokes out, and it's all he can manage at the moment. He hasn't said anything too terrible – he hasn't told her he's unhappy that she's going to be the mother of his child.

But it's the unadulterated fear in his voice that breaks something deep within her.

* * *

><p>Their fatal blow is the timing. The war, the Order, and the world itself takes her by her locks of red hair and makes her dance for them, while he holds the same locks as she hovers over an ivory toilet bowl.<p>

He is the first person to notice them. He doesn't smile, and accept her, or martyr her with kisses across the constellations on her arms. He frowns, creases she's never seen shifting on his face, and chokes out calm, painful words.

"You'll never do this again," he says, looking at her through the silver rims of his spectacles.

She swallows, and thinks for a moment, looking down at his hands, and the whites of his knuckles, as he grips her arms.

"Okay." She offers him the word like a lifeline, and he feels the breath escape from his chest as he tangles his hands in her hair and draws her in.

* * *

><p>"Sometimes," she says, the words getting caught inside of her, "I think I don't love him."<p>

He looks at her, his doe-eyed lover, and the child clutched in her arms, and worries that his heart might burst.

"There are so many things I wanted to do," she says, and her words strike a chord within him, reverberating through his body. He loves his son, and he loves the trembling woman in front of him, but he feels it too. He tries to live in the scary parts of her mind so he can catch her twisted thoughts like a dream catcher, but it grows harder with every passing day.

He doesn't know how to tell her that it's not their child's fault that the walls are closing in; that the blame isn't their son's burden to bear. He knows it's a fruitless task to try.

He's helplessly contradicted every self-deprecating word that has slipped through the cracks of her façade, but her messy soul isn't his to change.

He can't seem to keep her happy, and so his only goal now is to keep her alive.

He gives her the only words he has:

"It's okay," he whispers roughly. "It's okay."

* * *

><p>She's curled up in an armchair with the fire roaring in the grate, and he can't help but muse at how picturesque the scene is. A book is tucked beneath her arm, and her chest rises and falls softy with the rhythm of sleep.<p>

He loathes doing it, but he shakes her shoulder gently, rousing her from her slumber.

"Where's Harry?" he asks, as she blearily opens her eyes. He's momentarily mesmerized by their grey-green color, just as he was when he first met her at Hogwarts.

She fumbles for words. "I was…giving him a bath," she says dazedly, and looks around in confusion.

He feels fear grip him as he takes the stairs two at a time, fear that the worst may have come to pass – but he finds his son sitting in his bath water, his face screwed up in concentration as he slaps the water's surface and sends ripples through the tub.

He pulls Harry out of the tub and dries him off, all the while pressing sporadic kisses to his face, then heads downstairs to confront his wife. But the foreign look on her face stops him cold. He can hardly recognize her, and it terrifies him.

"How's your book?" he asks warily, settling his cooing son against his hip. The syllables fall pathetically from his lips, but he'll do anything to get to her – to know what she's thinking. She looks up at him with eerily hollow eyes, and shrugs.

"I think I'll call it an early night," she says quietly.

"Okay," he says gruffly, and his heart quickens its staccato tempo as she reaches on tiptoe to press a kiss to his cheek before she leaves the room.

He picks up the book she's left behind and examines the cover. It's the same muggle novel he's seen her reading before. He sets the book down and retrieves his son from the armchair, with the odd feeling that things had come full circle.

* * *

><p>She fell on the 31st of October.<p>

It wasn't a very long fall. In many ways, it wasn't a fall at all. She'd been falling for quite some time. On the 31st of October, 1981, Lily Potter landed.

Her husband's cold, lifeless body lay at the foot of the stairs, his last thoughts and words stolen from him by a flash of blinding light. But between them, nothing had been left unsaid – from the time he'd asked her to marry him, up until the last time he'd whispered to her that he'd loved her – nothing had gone unspoken.

On the 31st of October, James Potter and his wife fought together, one last time. Dark was the night, when their cracked world finally caved in at the seams.

But mercifully, in the end, they fell together.


End file.
